BIGshop.com.au, “Australian’s virtual shopping mall”, is an interesting concept. It aims to be the middle-man bringing shoppers and merchants together — to provide straight-through shopping experience for the shoppers, and to provide well designed online shop front for the merchants. Taken from their About Us page:

One Shopping Cart, One Account, Many Merchants, Thousands of Products… BIGshop.com.au is Australia’s One Stop Shop, a place where merchants and consumers meet and transact. On BIGshop.com.au you can shop from many merchants for thousands of products with one shopping cart and in one simple transaction. It is the quick and convenient way to shop. Furthermore, all our merchants are reputable Australian businesses who have passed our strict screening process, ensuring a safe shopping environment for all our BIGshop shoppers.

Having a shopping mall to host all the affiliated merchants is not a unique idea (think eBay and Amazon). BIGshop.com.au seems to be a late starter in this arena, although it is still not hugely populated in Australia. Are they as good as they claimed to be?

Shoppers Perspective

There are two shopping malls close to where I live (Sydney South/Eastern suburbs) — Eastlake shopping centre and Westfield Eastgardens. There are something I like about Eastlake — things are generally cheaper there. Aldi is there, and Woolies there always have specials. However if my family is going for a shopping trip, we will head over to Eastgardens for sure. Eastgardens is simply bigger, cleaner, brighter, having heaps more shops, and generally providing a better shopping experience. At the end price along is not the answer for everything.

So when you look at an online shopping mall, you gotta ask — how many shops are there, and how many products are they selling? The answers to these questions are directly related to how good a shopping experience would be.

From BIGshop’s shop directory, there are currently 13 shops, ranging from white goods, gadgets, perfumes, and even just ties and cuffs. Although not a lot, but there are usually more than one shops competition in the same category.

Instead of having confusing interface from shop to shop, all shops under BIGshop.com.au have the same easy-to-use interface, which is a good thing. Take Are-Jays for example — which one would you prefer, BIGshop.com.au’s shop-front, or their own shopping-cart?

Note — I am not having a go at Are-Jays — I think they are a great shop providing gadgets at great price. I am simply saying, BIGshop.com.au is doing a good job at aggregating the products from Are-Jays’ own website. Although it also runs the risk of loosing individual shop’s identify, as the only thing that’s unique between shops is a small shop logo at the top-left hand corner.

To find an item you wish to buy is also easy. The search box at the top allows you to search a product from entire site, from a specific merchant, or from a specific category. Say if I wish to buy an 30GB iPod, and found it on Are-Jays’:

Again you landed in BIGshop’s interface, where it clearly shown a product image, price of the product, cost for delivery and availability. There are a few other things that you can do to communicate with (1) other shoppers (2) BIGshop.com.au, and (3) Are-Jays.

• You can write a product review, which will be included under this product for all other shoppers to see.
• You can ask merchant a question.
• You can add this product to your BIGshop-wide wish list.

These features are certainly making BIGshop moving into Amazon’s direction, which is a good thing. I think part of Amazon’s success (besides good price and large range of products) is its interactivity with the merchants and other shoppers.

Well done!

Merchants Perspective

So for now, I think for BIGshop.com.au to be successful, it needs more merchants to sign up. Why should the merchants signing up to BIGshop.com.au? From its Sell on BIGshop.com.au page:

5 Reasons why you should be selling on BIGshop

1. Receive Paid Orders – We deliver paid orders directly to you
2. Pay-Per-Order – You only pay us when you make a sale
3. New Customers – Reach customers you would not have otherwise reached through your own website or offline business
4. Brand Building – Build your brand through your Bshop
5. Ease of Use – We provide you with the tools to leverage your existing e-commerce software and fully integrate it into BIGshop.

Basically, they will do the advertisement/selling/tracking for you, and you will only need to pay BIGshop per order. They have a sophisticated infrastructure that can integrate inventory and order data with merchant’s own website, and it seems they are supporting osCommerce and ZenCart, two of the most popular Open Source online shopping cart software.

Advertisement is also something that is beyond the scope of most online shops — how do you compete on direct or organic traffic with other big players who have heavy investment on search engine optimisation? I have seen BIGshop.com.au advertised on PPC and text-link-ads networks (actually, they have also bought a link on my other website) — it is something that many shop would not venture into.

Now, talking about the fees. I have no clue what so ever on how much BIGshop.com.au is charging the merchants, although I think it would need to be more attractive than merchants running their own ads. As you can get 3.5% back from MoneyBackCo, I think it would charge no less than that from the merchants.

There is also a merchant requirement on the BIGshop’s site. It is good to know that not every average joe can sign up as a merchant — they are free to go back to eBay :) They are certainly guarding for the shoppers as well as their own reputation.

Conclusion

I have just added BIGshop.com.au to my list of shops that I will visit when I need to buy anything online, because it is actually quite a good Australian shopping site. It is also nice to write a conclusion with a positive tone, which I won’t say from my past sponsored reviews.

As BIGshop.com.au has just started up, I am hoping to see more merchants there. Maybe it will be the Amazon for the Aussies. Maybe.